#304: Dr. Sharon Bergquist: The Stress Paradox - Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier
What if stress isn’t the enemy—but a secret ingredient for a longer, healthier life?
Rip is joined by Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, physician, scientist, and author of The Stress Paradox, to explore how certain types of stress can actually help us thrive.
In this conversation, we’ll explore what she calls "good stress" and her five key stressors that can enhance our longevity and healthspan:
Plant-based phytochemicals
Intermittent intense exercise
Thermal stress (heat and cold exposure)
Circadian fasting
Mental and emotional challenges
These kinds of stressors can actually activate the body’s repair systems and boost our physical and mental health.
You’ll also learn why modern comfort might be making us sicker, how to safely introduce beneficial stress into our lives, and practical, actionable strategies for building resilience and boosting vitality.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the idea that stress is something to avoid at all costs, this episode will offer you a liberating and science-backed shift in perspective.
About Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist
Dr. Sharon Bergquist is a practicing board-certified physician, researcher, and pioneer in lifestyle medicine, an approach that uses science-based nutrition, exercise, stress management, and other lifestyle factors to help people regain control of their health. She has helped lead clinical trials that have received $61 million in funding for evaluating the benefits of lifestyle interventions and finding early biomarkers for chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer.
Her book, The Stress Paradox: Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier (HarperCollins, March 2025), reveals the groundbreaking science behind how daily lifestyle habits can activate the body’s innate regenerative capacity, reshaping the way we approach aging, disease, and longevity.
Dr. Bergquist is widely published in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to over 200 news segments, including Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. She hosts The Whole Health Cure podcast and her TED-Ed video, “How Stress Affects Your Body,” has garnered over eight million views. She has received over forty patient care awards, including being peer-voted as one of Atlanta’s Top Doctors multiple times, and has been invited to the White House to collaborate with presidential advisers on healthcare reform.
She received her Bachelor of Science in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University and her medical degree from Harvard Medical School. She received her training in internal medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She has been on faculty at Emory University since 2000.
The Stress Paradox is available NOW
Episode Resources
https://drsharonbergquist.com/ - Dr. Bergquist’s website
Follow Dr. Bergquist on Instagram - @thegoodstressdoctor
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Full Episode Transcription via AI Transcription Service
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Introduction to Stress and Health
[0:06] What if the key to thriving isn't eliminating stress, but learning how to harness it? Today, I dive into a revolutionary new way to think about stress with Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, author of The Stress Paradox, Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier.
The Benefits of Good Stress
[0:30] We'll hear more about the benefits of stress, specifically the right kind, right after these words from PLANTSTRONG.
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[1:38] Today's episode is all about something that we all deal with, stress. The word actually makes me get a little stressed out, but all with a surprising little twist. Joining me today is Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist, a physician and author of The Stress Paradox, Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier. In this conversation, we explore what she calls good stress. Things like intense bursts of exercise, cold exposure, intermittent fasting, and even plant-based nutrition. And how these kind of stressors can actually activate the body's repair systems and subsequently boost our physical and mental health. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the idea that stress is something to avoid at all costs, this episode will offer you a liberating and science-backed shift in perspective.
Meet Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist
[2:42] It was eye-opening for me, and I know it will be for you too. Please welcome Dr. Sharon Bergquist. Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist.
[2:59] Saying it right always stresses me out. Did I say it right or not? Horesh? You said it right. I did. All right. All right. Welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. Thank you so much. It is such an honor and pleasure to be here. I'm so excited to have this conversation. Well, I am excited as well. And, you know, I think for starters, I know very little about you, Sharon. And so I would love for you to let me know, like, who are you? Who are you? And why are you on the podcast?
[3:34] Well, so I am a physician and scientist, and I'm in internal medicine. I'm practicing. I've been in an academic health system for 25 years with a long time practice. And I do a lot of work, research-based work. on how to use lifestyle as medicine. So that is why I'm on this podcast, because I love plants and I love using lifestyle as medicine.
[4:03] So that's the short version. And I've done a lot of clinical trials, not only looking at the efficacy of different lifestyle interventions, but we also do work on biomarkers for detecting disease at earlier stages. So we're currently doing an NIH-funded study looking at early detection for Alzheimer's disease. We're working on a trial that's looking at liquid biopsies for cancer. So essentially finding disease at earlier points. And so much of my practice is structured around how to go upstream, find these early predictors, and give people actionable advice to avoid disease from happening. And this is, of course, where the lifestyle piece is so huge. And because I practice internal medicine, I get to see longitudinally the effects of different interventions over different time points of people's lives. So a lot of my patients I've known now for about 25 years. Wow. Yeah, I've been in the same practice. But you look like you're 31. So you started medical school to Harvard when you were what, six? So it must be the good stress.
[5:17] But thank you. So, yeah, and that's the beauty. You get to see what happens over time. You get to see the impact on your patient and their lives. And that's ultimately, you know, where I get them as reward from my work. But it also informs where we need to understand the science better, where we need to do a better job, both in the health care system, which Lord knows we need to do a better job with prevention there, but also in how we communicate the information in a way where it's practical and accessible for everybody. Yeah. So a couple of things from what you just said that I want to explore just a little bit more. So you mentioned that right now it's kind of incredible how we can go upstream now and we can maybe discover cancer earlier, other chronic Western diseases. Do you feel like this is just going to be accelerating over the next five years with all the different diseases?
[6:21] Technologies and modalities that we have in front of us? Unquestionably. I mean, Rick, we're probably the most exciting time in medicine. The rate of acceleration of the tools that we are able to utilize is increasing exponentially. And this is even without AI. And I think that's going to be yet another transformational part of where we're headed. What I think is happening, though, is that the medicine is incredibly advanced and exciting, and we can understand our bodies in ways we've never been able to understand before. The healthcare system is not essentially following in a parallel path. I think the system is not implementing the things that we need to for prevention. So there's this beautiful science, but it's not being well utilized in the care delivery system. And that's where I think there's such a gap that needs to be addressed. No, I think that the current medical care system stresses everybody out.
[7:24] It does. It does. You know, again, I practice in the system, in a traditional medicine system. I understand the shortcomings, but I also have this foot in this exciting world of research and medicine and technology. And I see this potential and so much of the work that I've tried to do throughout my career is to bridge that, right? How do you change the health system in a way where you can create programs and ways to help? Really augment the way we traditionally deliver care for our patients. So not bypassing the system, but making this mainstream, right? So one of my biggest life's mission has been how do we get to that tipping point where this is how medicine is practiced, where you're no longer the kind of fringe, but you are the mainstream. And hopefully I can add a lot to that conversation with the work I've done over the past 25 years.
The Journey to Lifestyle Medicine
[8:28] Tell me a little bit about your own journey, your story. When did you start to kind of embrace more of the lifestyle medicine, whole food plant-based philosophy and why? Yeah, the whole food plant-based philosophy really came about a decade after I was practicing medicine. So like so many physicians, you leave residency feeling really confident in your ability to diagnose and treat disease. And, you know, and I had wonderful, incredible mentors. So I felt that I could certainly do that well. And of course, you build on that. But in the first decade, you know, I was implementing everything that I knew. But the fact of the matter is that the disease process that my patients were facing, things like metabolic disease, insulin resistance, that process was progressing despite the fact that we had all their numbers beautifully controlled. Like I was winning awards for patient care by hitting these metrics of blood sugar average, such as hemoglobin A1C being in good range, blood pressures being well controlled.
[9:41] Well, not only were you getting awards... You were nominated as one of the best doctors in Atlanta. That's no small feat. Yeah. Well, thank you. And yeah. And, you know, so there's certainly by guidelines, we were practicing good medicine. But for me, that just didn't feel satisfying because I distinctly remember one of my patients who had metabolic disease over the decade. I saw her develop diabetes and later on breast cancer.
[10:16] There's a clear link between metabolic disease and the metabolic aspects of cancer. And I distinctly recall her breast cancer becoming, unfortunately, stage four. And her only wish was to see her daughter, who was the first generation in this country, graduate from college. and the pain and the suffering that we go through in this country, that is preventable. It was just what was gnawing at me. I knew I was capable of more. I have a background in molecular biochemistry and biophysics from my undergraduate years. I had worked on splicing messenger RNA, really loved the science of the pathways in our bodies. And I felt I was not using that science for salutogenesis, which is like, how do you build health, right? I understood it in the context of pathogenesis, right? How do you prevent disease? And that is- What was that word that you said for building health? Salutogenesis.
[11:18] Salutogenesis. Salute. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Salutogenesis, correct. Yeah. And that to me was the turning point. And it took me down a path. And like most people who utilize food as medicine and exercise as medicine, And it took me a path of individual learning, right, because now this is the type of information that you're not taught. But I am a very determined person. So I would get up early every morning before a clinic. Every weekend I would spend hours really busy. Trying to understand nutrition science, exercise physiology.
[11:55] Stress management and resiliency, all of these factors that ultimately are what build health. So that's what took me down the path. And from there, you know, got some grants to do research in this area, just started to find ways to contribute to the conversation. We created a teaching kitchen at my institution. Really one of my mentors when I was at Harvard was David Eisenberg, who's like the father of the teaching kitchen. And I think his model of bringing people to the table literally as a learning lab for building lifestyle tools is such an innovative and fun way to help people live healthier lives. So we did three year long clinical trials using a teaching kitchen based model, looking at different health outcomes. The first was in person. We subsequently did the program virtually. This was during the time of COVID. And after that, we did the program hybrid. We've looked at cost efficacy. We have derived a lot of data to understand the value of this type of intensive therapeutic lifestyle intervention in people's lives. We've done it as worksite wellness programs. It is really, to me, the excitement of what is possible in health care. Wow.
[13:22] So you recently decided to roll up your sleeves and write a book. Yes. Yes. Let me hold that book up right here. There she blows, The Stress Paradox, Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, to live longer, healthier, and happier. Those are matches on the front of that,
The Stress Paradox Unpacked
[13:47] isn't it? They are matches. Yeah. Some are burned all the way down and the last one's very fresh. Yes. Is this where we want to be right here? A hundred percent. Stress does not lead all the time to burnout, right? Stress can energize, stress can lighten you up.
[14:10] If I don't go too far with that analogy. But yes, so that's the paradox, right? How do you utilize stress in a way that you are allowing it to have you live your healthiest, best and most vibrant life? Well, I love the fact that you are redefining what our relationship should look like with stress. Because so many of us, I think, are so burned out. We're so stressed out just because of how we're living. Most of us are living our lives these days. And the fact that you can say, listen, it's okay. Like, let's look at stress in a positive light. And these are the stressors that you need to understand why you should be incorporating more of it. You know, so many of us, I think, especially as a former athlete, I kind of live by the adage, you know, if it doesn't kill me, it'll make me stronger, right?
[15:12] Well, we're going to debunk that a little bit. We should. Yeah. Because I don't want stress to kill you. It shouldn't to make you stronger.
Redefining Our Relationship with Stress
[15:21] And that's really the short version of the message for today. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then so many people are like, oh, I'm just so stressed out. You know, my wife and I get home and we look at each other and we're like, well, I'm exhausted. I'm burned out. I'm exhausted. I'm burned out. I'm more burned out. No, I'm more burned out. You know, it's kind of a conscious to see who's more stressed out. Yeah. I mean, you know, and this is really how we associate stress, right? We associate it with the type that harms us. And for sure, stress does. There's no question. We have 90 years of medical literature linking chronic stress to all these adverse health outcomes. But what we lose sight of is that the stress response is there to help us survive. It has for our ancestors throughout millennia, and it does for us today. The healthy stress response is a beginning, a middle, and an end. And our stress response isn't just a fight or flight.
[16:20] It is far more nuanced. And what we're understanding from a molecular and cell biology standpoint is that stress ripples down to our cells and the communications and signals between our cells. That is the deeper story of how our body responds to stress. That is the story that I'm unraveling in the book because within that story is the key to how the stress can regenerate our bodies, create health, build the foundation that we need for longevity and vibrancy. So you talk about how with these beneficial stressors, we can actually repair and regenerate upstream, right? And upstream in our cells, and then that can help prevent these diseases, these chronic western diseases that are running rampant. Well, I know you talk about in your book five kind of overarching key stressors that, when applied appropriately, can bolster our mental, emotional, and physical health.
[17:34] Should we walk through those? Do you think that's a good use of our time? We should. And maybe even before going down the path of what the stressors are and how do you analyze them. Explaining why we even want to stress ourselves, right? Like, you know, I think there's a little bit of a leap still of telling people who are stressed that you need more stress. So I feel like I should explain that a little bit better before we jump into how to stress yourself out.
[18:08] So to me, the fascination and excitement here is in that word regenerative medicine or regeneration, Our bodies have this incredible innate ability to heal, repair, and regenerate. And regenerative medicine is a term I think people are growing to be more and more familiar with. We think of regenerative medicine as really a type of treatment, right? The goal of regenerative medicine is to take our body's natural innate repair and regenerative capability and to utilize that to essentially eradicate or improve disease states. So instead of treating symptoms, we are taking the fundamental thing that's broken and essentially repairing and regenerating it. For example, we can inject stem cells in a joint and try and regenerate some of the cartilage tissue. We can take immune cells out of our body, these T-cells, in a form of therapy called immunotherapy. We can engineer those T-cells to recognize cancer, put them back in our bodies where they attack cancer like heat-seeking missiles. These are regenerative therapies. And we think of them as this sci-fi, 3D, like we're going to create organs, 3D print them. and I think that's hugely exciting but these are.
[19:30] Thought of as treatments that when you go to a health system, this is something that gets injected in you or given to you. And the real breakthrough with this understanding of stress is that we can activate this regenerative ability through our lifestyle, through daily habits.
[19:51] That changes everything, right? The goal is to support our body, to regenerate. And when we do that, we are making our cells healthier. Our cells are the most fundamental unit in our body, right? Our tissues are made of cells and our organs are made of different tissues. And essentially you're creating a kind of ground up way, a systems biology way of making your body healthy. Because if you think of your cells, like I like the analogy of thinking your cells as if you had a conveyor belt in a manufacturing plant, and you're processing these cells, if one cell has a defect.
[20:33] For example, the mitochondria aren't working in a cell and that cell can't make energy properly, well, you're using that cell as a part that's going to go to different organ systems. So if it's impaired, every organ system that you give that defective cell to, whether it's your brain, your heart, your muscles, your body's going to be underpowered and it's going to experience the damage from that defect. But if you repair the mitochondria, which is what these lifestyle components can do, you are sending every part of your body a healthier cell, right? You're making your brain healthier, which affects your mood, your creativity, your decision-making. You're making your heart stronger so it can pump with greater force. You're making your muscles more capable, more endurance. So this is really such a foundational approach and.
[21:25] In my years of being in lifestyle medicine, I think these stressors, which we're about to talk about, are the largest levers for improving our health because you can't go further upstream than your cells. Like we have 37 trillion cells and there is no more upstream. They are the smallest unit in our body. So our cellular health is a micro version of our overall health. And if we can get to this ultimate root, right, at the bottom, bottom of the earth before the trunk and the root sprout, that is how we create total body health. It's the connection between mind, body, medicine. Are the cells smaller than molecules? Right. In terms of size, I mean, so I think of cells and molecules as kind of one kind of level of systems. So some of these repair processes actually are happening at a molecular level, which is comparable to a cellular level. And some of it are the signal communications, which are happening between molecules that are talking to our cells. So I think of it as kind of one level of, um, size and structure in our body. So I just, just to, so I can really understand this, you're saying at the most basic foundational fundamental level.
[22:53] Are our 37 trillion cells. So there's nothing more basic than our cells that can be triggered and activated and excited? Cells and molecules. So everything that is truly the basis of our symptoms and disease and aging is happening at the level of our cells. So I can kind of do a brief tour through the cell.
Understanding Cellular Health
[23:22] But I'll do so just to explain this a little bit better because our cells, certainly we know that they have a nucleus that houses our DNA and our genome. Our cells have power plants, which we call mitochondria that create the energy. Our cells have manufacturing plants where we make protein called ribosomes. Our cells have recycling centers called glycosomes where we take old and damaged parts and we can recycle and kind of salvage what we can use. So each cell has all these things in it? Yes, each cell does. It sounds like each cell is a little mini universe.
[24:01] That is exactly right. And we have over 200 types of cells. So they differentiate. So an eye cell is specialized and a heart cell is specialized in its own way, but they all have these same fundamental capabilities. And what we're understanding about disease, if you go further upstream to this level of the cell, is that when one of these cellular components isn't working right, so if mitochondria are impaired and a person has mitochondrial dysfunction, the cell can't make energy. And when I say the cell, I'm talking about all the cells in your body because generally these things are systemic. So when your cells are underpowered, they cannot make the energy. Your body cannot do its essential functions. If your body is not...
[24:52] Actively doing a basal and sufficient amount of autophagy, which is using its recycling center, lack of autophagy is a contributor to all the chronic diseases we're seeing, neurodegenerative diseases, heart disease, diabetes, metabolic disease. So really, our symptoms, disease, and the rate of aging are largely controlled by what is happening at the level of our cells, like are our proteins damaged, what is not functioning well. And what's hugely exciting is through our lifestyle, we can actually repair what is not going right in our cells, right? What an incredible regenerative innate ability that is in the gift that we have in our DNA. And why the heck aren't we using it? You have such a great grasp of this and you explain it so well. And I want to follow that up with a question. But you mentioned way earlier when we were talking that you would get up early and you really want to understand certain things before you saw patients. You spent weekends, what was driving you so hard?
[26:10] What drives me, Rep, is I feel like I am capable of delivering more. Like for me, it was this was not meaningful enough to just treat disease, right? And I knew I was capable of more. And that, to me, is a longer story of kind of probably rooted in childhood. And, you know, I am the first generation here in the United States, and I think like every first generation, you come to this country wanting more to expand your horizons, to live a better life.
[26:46] And to me, that is kind of this core question I've had throughout my life of how do I do that in my own life, but how do I bring others along with me in that path? And I extended that to my professional life, where to me, just treating conditions for my patients wasn't good enough. I knew there was limitless possibility. I knew I and they were capable of a better life. So to me, this is very deep rooted of what matters to me and why I think I'm on this earth. So it's a much larger part. And getting up early in the morning is actually a good stress, which we can talk about. Really? Is it really?
[27:35] And if, you know what, Rip, if it is because you are energized and it's something that aligns with your belief system and you're speaking your truth, yes. If it's because I need to get up to do something that does not align with my belief system, that really is not what I would choose to do with my time, of course not. So that's really a key distinction. That makes a lot of sense. That aligns with my thinking. So let me ask you this. You dedicated the book to your father. Why your father? He obviously must have had a huge influence on you. Yeah.
[28:18] Yes, I did. My father was one of the most remarkable people you would ever meet. Well, your father's an incredibly remarkable person. So I will maybe say in my mind, they're in the same league. But obviously, they've had very different career paths. But my father had this ability to create calm in the space he was always around. You know, people remember him that any corner of the room that he was ever in, that was where you could go for calm.
[28:59] And to me, when a person has this resilience, this inner synchrony, which is the goal of good stress. Yeah. Creates this inner state that becomes reflected in your outer state. And that's what my dad had. It was this beautiful, synchronous inner state.
[29:19] And it sends an energy that attracts instead of repels, that emits cohesion instead of chaos, right? It lifts others up instead of bringing them down. That was my dad. And to me, good stress is the path to create this incredibly beautiful inner resilient state. And the beauty of it is that you influence others by your internal state. And if we all did this, we are not just benefiting for our own lives. We are creating this beautiful circle of energy that lifts others up and it creates this beautiful world where we get to influence people in the most positive and beneficial way and what a gift that is. So this book is dedicated to him where he did a lot of hard things, not by choice, but I think, you know, I think a lot of our parents' generation had a very hard life relative to ours in many ways. I mean, we have different sets of challenges modern day, but they objectively.
[30:29] Lived through world wars and the Great Depression and fought in different wars. The one thing I think our parents have in common, and to me that objectively, they had very hard lives, but they had such an ability to have inner peace and joy. And that is what I hope others can gain. and my dad did it by example without ever really trying to, I, being the science person that I am, have sought to understand what is that state, what creates that resilience, and really to slice and dice it and, you know, science the shit out of it, for lack of a better term. Let's do it. Yeah, and really understand and help others through that in a way that can be more of a, quote,
A Tribute to My Father
[31:28] protocol for lack of a better term, but in a way that we can all implement in our lives. Is your father still alive today? No, he passed away November of 2022. Sorry about that.
[31:42] Is your mother still alive? Yes, yes. she is uh-huh and uh what was her personality like she is um again you know i think um our moms are very much alike so my mom runs like half marathons gets up and has her you know turmeric and ginger drink and starts her day off with um all fresh whole ingredients and um is a bundle of energy and loves life. And anyone who knows her just knows the energy that she emits. So she is an incredible human being. Well, lucky you. That's great. Let's get back to where we were. We were talking about kind of at a cellular level. And one of the things that.
[32:39] You talk about extensively in your book is this term called hormesis. And so I'd love for you to explain that to the PLANTSTRONG audience. Yeah, hormesis is the science of good stress. And the word derives from a Greek word to excite.
The Science of Hormesis
[32:58] So hormesis is essentially activating or exciting these cellular stress responses. And these cellular stress responses are unlocking our ability to repair and regenerate ourselves. Perfect. I think we've also touched upon this, but it seems like all these modern day kind of.
Modern Comforts and Health Implications
[33:28] Lifestyle comforts, creature comforts that we have for, I think for a lot of us have, Unless you actively seek it out, they've diminished our ability to maybe be exposed to some of these beneficial stressors that you talk about in the book. Are there any implications when you're not doing that? 100% I mean this book is essentially a wake up call of just the course correction we need to slow the epidemics that we're seeing of mental and physical health. The connection point here is that, Maybe it would be helpful here to talk about what these five good stressors are, and then we can understand them in our human history and how we've kind of worked them out. So the five stressors, these good hormetic stressors, are plant phytochemicals, exercising with intervals of intensity, using heat and cold, fasting in a circadian pattern, and good mental and emotional challenges.
[34:38] And the common thread between these five hormetic stressors is that our bodies perceive them as a stress. And that kind of throws our body out of this homeostatic balance, this balance that our body needs for health. And it puts us in the stress-resistant mode where our cells hunker down and they start to turn on these defense mechanisms such as autophagy, such as repairing our mitochondria, because they are just getting ready for it, like preparing for a rainy day. So they're trying to operate more efficiently and repair themselves and jettison like their old and damaged parts. When the stressor passes, our bodies have created these healthier cells and these healthier cells grow and we reestablish our homeostatic balance at a point that nets resilience, where we are healthier, and stronger. So that's the common thread between these hormetic stressors. So why do we even respond this way to these types of stress? And this is where looking back at our human history and understanding what we've removed from kind of these needed inputs has done to our health present day is really important. So our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
[36:05] They had to roam long distances in search of food and were constantly at the threat of starvation. They had to have these intermittent bursts of running, whether they're trying to catch predators or running away. Or a big thing of kale.
[36:27] That's right. That's exactly right. Well, and they had to consume as many edible foods as possible because they needed as much energy as possible. And they had to explore beyond the horizon to create tools to have, you know, to become valuable to their tribe. So they were in this environment where they're, you know, exposed to these harsh stressors and, you know, the heat and the elements. me. They lived in impermanent shelters. Over time, our bodies developed adaptations where we learned not only to handle the stress, but to become stronger as a result of these stressors. That is what helped us as humans over 2.4 million years, not just survive, but thrive and become the most successful species on the planet.
[37:22] Is that kind of Darwinian? It's somewhat Darwinian. And, you know, it kind of maybe echoes a little bit of paleo. But what I want to differentiate here is the paleo movement clearly, you know, has this link to how ancestral life is, one that we should mimic. But when you look at natural selection, it is driven by what helps us survive and is driven by reproductive health. Natural selection does not select for health, right? It's for survival and reproduction, right? So not all things paleo are healthy and not all modern day things are necessarily unhealthy, right? So it's not a pure link to natural selection, but we now have the molecular and cellular tools to understand what is happening to our body and ourselves when we go through these stressors. So we're essentially reverse engineering the life we were meant to live by looking at the impact of our behaviors and choices on our genome.
The Five Good Stressors
[38:28] So these five stressors that you just talked about, right? Plants, short bursts of movement, thermal therapies, circadian fasting, and then mental challenges. Is you talk about how one of the things that they do is they kind of ignite these ancient pathways in us. But do each one of them ignite the same ancient pathways or different pathways depending upon the stressor? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a little bit of both. So different stressors ignite different cellular stress responses.
[39:07] There's also a lot of overlap. So when you incorporate multiple, kind of like stacking these behaviors, you create this incredible synergy that's like fireworks in your body.
[39:20] So there are seven cellular stress responses. And I'll kind of do a kind of high level overview. So one is a DNA damage response. It helps us heal and repair our DNA. We have two that help us repair proteins. So proteins are the workhorse in our body. We have 20,000 to 100,000 proteins, and they're doing most of the work. Like they create the enzymes in our body, and most is driven by protein. So we have two processes. One is our heat shock proteins and our unfolded protein response that are essentially helping our proteins form. Like if you remember those little fortune teller things we would make out of paper when we were kids? Sure, yeah. So that's what proteins are like. They have to be folded just right for them to function. Otherwise, your little fortune teller wouldn't open and you couldn't read your fortune, right? So we have this stress response that makes sure that they're folded and shaped properly for these proteins to function well. And our heat shock proteins can literally chaperone, they're molecular chaperones, they chaperone damaged protein out of our body. So if you have clumped proteins, your heat shock proteins can help remove them. And if we didn't have this heat shock protein response, these aggregated proteins. When you say heat shock, are you talking about heat therapy or is that a different term?
[40:42] Yeah. So heat shock proteins get activated by heat therapy, but they also get activated by cold therapy, by exercise, by plants. So to your question of heat, do they activate the same responses? Yes, there's a lot of overlap.
[41:01] Heat is certainly a very potent way to do it. I mean, within 30 minutes of heat exposure, you go up by about 50% of your level of heat shock proteins and it stays elevated for about two hours. So that's clearly a very potent way to do it, but there are others. And then your other cellular stress responses are the autophagy response that helps us do the recycling of these damaged and old parts. So autophagy being self-eating, from the Greek self-eating. So that is another response. And we have an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory response. I think people are very familiar with the terms antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, but what's new here and what's incredible is that these stressors activate our body's own ability to raise our antioxidant capability and our own ability to moderate inflammation. So it's not as though we are getting all that we need in terms of antioxidants from food or different elements of our lifestyle.
[42:01] Our lifestyle can activate our body's innate ability to raise our basal level of antioxidant capability, which is hugely powerful, right? That we have what we need built inside us and we need this lifestyle to support what we already have, right? And then we have a sirtuin response. That's the seventh of them that helps. Sirtuins are remarkable. They do so many functions in the body. Can you spell that word? Sirtuins are S-I-R-T-U-I-N.
[42:35] One of their key functions, though, is they help regulate metabolism, and they can help us create new mitochondria in a process called mitochondrial biogenesis. So when people have impaired mitochondria or insufficient mitochondria from disuse, when we activate the sirtuin response, we are essentially creating renewable energy in our body. And we have this incredible mechanism to actually take damaged mitochondria out of our body through mitophagy, so form of autophagy, and create this mission-free, like clean energy in our body. And mitochondria are becoming increasingly such a focal point of understanding human health. They are probably the connection point because they create this hub in our body of flow of energy, and they communicate with our circadian rhythm, with our immune system, with our gut. And when our mitochondria are impaired, every organ system, it just wreaks havoc everywhere in our body. So having our bodies powered appropriately is so hugely important for understanding human health and aging. Okay. I want to come back and ask you a question about that, but not right now. Okay.
[44:01] If you're cool with it, I'd love to dive into number one, which is plants. Yes. So let me just try and set this up a little bit. Obviously, you know, this is the PlantStrong Podcast.
[44:20] So we are in love with plants and all they have to offer, right? The antioxidants, the phytonutrients, the vitamins, the minerals, the fiber, all that wonderful jazz. You know, there's a whole... Swath of people that are trying to say that, you know, plants contain these negative compounds and, you know, whether it's the lectins, the lignans, you know, whatever it is. And you and I think both know that the reality is most Americans are not eating plants. It's like, so why are these people bashing plants? Is it so people eat more meat and dairy and continue to get unhealthy? I don't know the root causation, but what I am fascinated is that you are saying in The Stress Paradox that plants are a stressor. I never ever thought of me eating plants as being a stressor, right? Or a form of stress. But you're saying that it is in a good one. Form of stress that we absolutely cannot live without. And I am so glad to talk about this because this is where the internet goes crazy and there's so much debate. So unpacking this, I think, is so important.
[45:41] If we look back again through this ancestral lens that we were talking about, so the explanation of why these plants are so beneficial is really rooted in the long-standing relationship we have co-evolved with our plants. So throughout human history and why it's inextricable to create human health without this co-evolution over literally like millions of years of what has helped us thrive. As we were mentioning before, our ancestors had to forage in search of food and have as many edible foods as possible that were not toxic or fatal to survive. The diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, by necessity, had over 3,000 plant species.
[46:40] Now, the plants also had a need to survive. And the way plants survive is they can't be eaten.
[46:50] Right. And so they have this vested interest to deter us and insects from eating them and to resist drought and like UV sunlight, etc. They have to survive as well. And so our bodies, our ancestors' bodies, develop these mechanisms to take these natural pesticides that plants make to deter us, rapidly detoxify them, and build our resistance to the plant so that we could consume it. And lucky for us, this ability to increase our resistance is driven by these cellular stress responses. So when we consume plants, our bodies recognize it as a gentle stress that sends off these master regulators in our body that turn on our innate repair and regenerative capability. That is how we can mitigate the harm that is happening from processed foods and everything else in our world today, right? This is why in so many studies, you have to control for fruits and vegetables, right? Like, because as soon as you add them, you're essentially creating a healthier state, right? So when you look at high meat, low meat, or whatever else...
[48:12] You can repair damage by adding the plant food. I mean, this is what's so profound, right? Through the lens of hormesis, you understand the beauty of plant food in an entirely different way. And the phytochemicals are magic, right? Like all plant food is magic. Like there's so many different components. Like you said, there's fiber, the vitamins, the minerals. But the phytochemicals, this non-nutritive component that has been left out of this big debate of protein and carbs and fats, this is the magic that turns on this ancient secret code that unlocks our ability to slow our aging process and fight disease. So tell me this, to the best of your knowledge, how many known phytonutrients or phytochemicals now have we identified that exist in plants?
[49:17] They're probably over 100,000. We have well characterized about 5,000 of them. And we have also about a dozen that we're understanding how they work on a hormetic level. So there are 10 in particular, and I mentioned these in the book, where we understand the hormetic pathways, how our stress responses are actually turned on by these plants. And the key here is that, These are plant toxins. And when I use that term, I don't mean that they are toxic. Yeah. Okay. So not all toxins are toxic. And this is really the key. Like hormesis is based on this idea that it's a mild to moderate amount of stress followed by recovery, right? So when you're creating or consuming a diet, a variety of plant food, you are getting a mild to moderate amount of these phytochemicals that are so gently stressing our body. but they're nudging us towards health, right? So an analogy I use for this is think of yourselves as this bank account.
[50:25] All the processed food and being sedentary, chronic stress, loneliness are taking money out of that bank account, right? You're creating damage in yourselves when you are adding these good stressors. So just adding some plant food to whatever diet you currently follow, you're making deposits into that bank account. So the lack of stress, the fact that we have removed the diversity of plants that we're consuming in our diet today, the fact that we've removed all these stressors through the comforts and conveniences are creating this imbalance in our body where we're incurring damage, but we are not activating our ability to repair that damage in a way we have never done throughout human history. I mean, this is all in the last 200 years, and we wonder why we need these incredible technologies to cure chronic disease and why they're so rampant. Well, the answer is not just, hey, remove processed foods. Yes, that's hugely important, but what's being left out is what's not seen, is what have we removed from these advances? And we've removed these stressors, which are such a primordial part of what makes us human and what we need to be strong, resilient people.
[51:45] You frame it up in such a nice way. And again, I'll come back to what I said when we started talking about plants here. I never thought of plants as being a good or a bad stress. I just thought of them as being a healthy food, right? Yeah. But so this is a whole new kind of light and way of looking at them. And then in that same vein, you know, so plants are a good stressor. And then, you know, animal, animal byproducts, the process, refined foods. These are more of the, I would say, bad stressors that promote inflammation and all kinds of, you know.
[52:30] Incite disease processes. So very cool. Yeah. So if I may, I'm going to add something I think is just fascinating, right? So for about 50 years in nutrition science, we've thought of phytochemicals as antioxidants that we get from food, right? Like the colors of the rainbow, right? We're eating antioxidants.
The Role of Plants in Health
[52:52] When you look at the measured amount in our body, So like I said, we rapidly detoxify these phytochemicals and we don't really absorb a lot of it into our body. Like we have evolved mechanisms to not allow us to absorb a lot. So when you measure the amount that is in our system of these phytochemicals, we're in the order of like nanomolars amount. But you need micromolar amounts to, in a tit-for-tat way, kind of squash the damage from a free radical, right? So if you try to neutralize a free radical, you would need orders of magnitude more phytochemicals in your body than what is the measured amount.
[53:38] Hormesis is really the theory that explains what these plants are doing, right? Because if you think that that small nanomolar amount is enough to activate your own antioxidant defense systems, right? Your own enzymes, the glutathione, catalase superoxide dismutase, you are understanding how the plants are building your own antioxidant resistant capability, right? And that to me is such a game changer, right?
[54:06] And it helps you understand when you look at global studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study, which is, you know, is one of the largest studies looking at the impact of diet on mortality. So one out of five deaths worldwide in this 27-year-long survey, over 195 countries were attributed to food and diet. But the real headline is not just that one out of five deaths are attributed to diet. The real headline is when you look at the breakdown of how many deaths are attributable to red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages, these foods that we certainly vilify, try and avoid. Right.
[54:46] They are small by orders of magnitude compared to the deaths attributable to not getting enough plant food. Right. So if you look at the deaths from not getting enough whole grains, it's 30 fold higher than the deaths attributed to getting too much red meat or sugar sweetened beverages. Right. So this speaks to the power of just giving ourselves like adding a plant food. Right. So like you said already, so few people are even eating the plants. Only one out of 10 people in this country is consuming the five fruits and vegetables that are recommended each day. If we simply just add it. That would do so much more for us than all these heated debates we're having about, you know, should we remove this and should we remove that? Like, yes, we should remove these things that are harming human health. But I think we would move the needle just so far if we just added one fruit or vegetable like that simple.
[55:49] And to me no matter what a person's dietary preference is what they're allergic to etc surely everyone can find a plant food that they can just add to their diet wow that was really wonderful and you're right i mean i didn't know the numbers were that bad one in ten is not getting five servings of fruits and vegetables a day again this is why everybody we want this country we want you to go from being plant weak to PLANTSTRONG. Right. And then look at all the wonderful things that will happen at a cellular and molecular level.
Exercise: The Key to Cellular Health
[56:25] Shall we move on to your exercise kind of recommendations? Yeah. All right. Fascinating. So let me just set this up by saying that, you know, I've been an avid exerciser my whole life for almost 20 years. I competed at world-class level in triathlons, swimming, biking, and running. I kind of trained myself into the ground, I think, to a level that probably was not, Looking back on it, I think I was chronically stressing myself with exercise.
[57:00] And if I could go back and do it differently, I would. I wouldn't train as often. I wouldn't train as long. And I do shorter, stronger bursts. But what do you recommend everybody does? Yeah. I mean, so you kind of just hit the nail on the head of looking at exercise through the hormetic lens, right? Right. So again, we want a mild to moderate amount of stress. And yes, exercise is a stress followed by recovery. Right. So breaking it up. So any good stress can become a chronic stress if there is not that opportunity for your body to recover. The growth happens in recovery. Right. So we kind of know this conceptually. Right. If you lift weights, you create micro tears in your muscle. it is in the period of recovery that you develop the adaptations, the muscle hypertrophies, you get the muscle stronger. But without the 24 to 48 hours after the weightlifting, if you do not have an appropriate recovery, it hampers the amount of hypertrophy and growth you can get from the stress. So like you just said, so key to have a mild to moderate amount of stress and then this recovery period. So yes, that does shape workout routines.
[58:17] What's really fascinating when you also look at this from a hormetic lens is you need enough stress to actually activate your stress responses. So a leisurely, like, I don't know, walking to the kitchen to get a cup of water. Like, yes, movement is good, but that is a different and independent benefit from we're talking about here. We need a level of intensity that's at least moderate to create enough stress where our cells are sensing, goodness, I'm experiencing energy depletion. There's all these free radicals that are being formed. And those are the triggers to activate the cellular stress responses. So you need at least moderate intensity.
[59:02] What's fascinating is the unique benefit we get from high intensity or vigorous exercise. And this is what kind of comes to light when you understand what is kind of getting triggered in our body at different levels of intensity. So the unique benefit of these kind of more intense or vigorous exercise is that when your body senses a very rapid exposure to a stressor, so like a high-intensity interval training, the adaptations you build are greater.
[59:39] So for the matched workload, if you take someone who has moderate-intensity exercise versus high-intensity matched workloads, you see greater gains from the higher-intensity exercise. And that's purely by how our body and our central nervous system senses the stress and the adaptations that we gain from that higher level of stress.
[1:00:02] Molecularly, that higher level of stress activates pathways that stimulate the mitochondrial biogenesis, the new mitochondria. So exercise is the most potent way to improve the mitochondrial energy base in our body and to not only increase the number and volume, but to also repair and create healthier mitochondria. So with that greater intensity, you see greater gains in mitochondrial health. And there are a lot of cellular mechanisms that I certainly can talk through of the sensors in our body that sense the fuel gauge like AMPK tells us our energy level is low. This red light on the dashboard essentially goes off in our body. That tells us, oh my goodness, we need to increase how we make energy, right? Our cells are saying, I'm stressed. I'm rapidly depleting energy. That AMPK activates this master regulator called PGC1-alpha, which is kind of this regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis. And that's the signal for a body, make more mitochondria. And mitochondria underlie your metabolism, right? So metabolism in a technical sense is our ability to take chemical energy, like any food that we eat, and convert it to cellular energy in the form of ATP.
[1:01:23] If our bodies cannot do that due to impaired mitochondria, I don't care how healthy you're eating, and I dare say even if it's a plant-based diet, if you don't have the cellular engines to convert that chemical energy efficiently into ATP, you are not gonna like just be the best you can be you're not gonna have all this energy and i say this all the time in my patients who are like i eat a really clean diet i eat super healthy why do i not feel great well look at your cellular engines right like you can give a ferrari like high octane fuel but if the engine isn't working, like there's a limit to what you can expect out of your body can you give us some, um specifics regarding, So that people that are listening, when you say durations of high-intensity exercise, are we talking 30 seconds? Are we talking five minutes? Yeah. So you want a blend of moderate intensity plus high intensity.
[1:02:35] You need that moderate intensity to also help build a good base of mitochondria. And the peaks really just push you to an ability to kind of reach a higher aerobic capacity or a higher VO2 max. So you need a blend of the two. So what an ideal regimen would look like would be at least 180 minutes a week of some level of moderate intensity and then one or two high intensity interval workouts in a week. And the optimal high-intensity interval workout is, so there's different terminology around high intensity. So you want to reach a range where you are vigorous, but not a sprint interval training necessarily. So sprint interval training is like all out, like 95 plus percent of your maximum predicted heart rate. If you are at a high intensity, you're roughly 80 to 95 percent, or if people prefer to use a perceived exertion scale.
[1:03:38] You want it to be somewhere like on a scale of one to 10, like seven to nine, like in that range of hard or through the talk test, you wanna be able to get out a few words, but not to be able to talk in complete sentences. So that's kind of the threshold range you wanna be. And those intervals, when you're at that level of intensity where it's not the sprint level, you're able to sustain it longer. You can do like a three or four minute interval as opposed to a 30 second interval. So you're able to spend a greater amount of time in these high intensity time periods. And that is optimal when you're trying to build your mitochondrial health. So a really common regimen that's utilized is a Norwegian four by four protocol, which is four minutes of high intensity, three minute kind of lower intensity break. So you're doing four by four intervals of high intensity broken up by three minutes where you slow down enough to recover your breath a little bit and let your heart rate come down, but not entirely. And then you kind of do another interval. And so we could apply this to anything, whether biking, swimming, jogging, walking.
[1:04:53] And this is so key, right? So I feel so strongly that whatever health habit that I ever recommend has to be practical and accessible, right? Like I work full time, like most of my patients work full time. So this is not like for longevity biohackers. This is for everyday you and me, like how do we make this work as part of our lives? And a big part of it is that it's take whatever you like doing and at least once or twice a week, do it in intervals.
[1:05:23] If you like walking, walk in intervals of fast and slow pace. If you like cycling, do it in some interval where you're kind of going real hard for a few minutes and you're slowing down. If you like elliptical, same thing. If you like dancing, hiking, I don't care what you like to do. Just do it in intervals. And I will tell you, this is a really fun, fascinating study. This was a Japanese study looking at interval walking. So they, in this study, took middle and older age adults and had one group do a moderate intensity, continuous pace walk 30 minutes, about four days a week over five months. Another group did it in intervals, three minutes fast, three minutes slow down, catch your breath, three minutes fast walk, three minutes slow down, catch your breath. And over the five months, the groups that walked in this interval way increased their VOT max by 15%, reduced their cardiometabolic risk factors by 20%, right? So outperformed the moderate continuous pace group. And this is a group of middle-aged older adults. You know, the term high intensity seems so intimidating to people. And the reality is it's what's intense to you, right? For one person, that could be, you know, a brisk walk for another person like yourself, who's like a trained athlete. Okay, it's going to be intense, you know, but it's what's intense to you. Yeah. Yeah.
[1:06:51] Good. It's interesting. I've, I've gotten to a point, even though I'm 62 now where I'm out training and my body craves that. All right. Let's like, let's redline it, you know, a couple of times. And I find that after doing a workout like that, I'm able to then reach a level of Zen-ness after the workout that it just is like, Oh, that was so good. Right. Where I don't get it if I don't actually do those hard bursts. Yeah. And you know, what's happening biochemically, and I'll say this because there's so much misconception around this hormone cortisol. So I feel like this needs to be said. When you're doing these high bursts, yes, you are going to have a spike in cortisol.
[1:07:38] But what ultimately matters is this is a brief intermittent spike in cortisol followed by recovery when you're doing high-intensity interval training. This is how our stress response was designed to be beneficial. Not all spikes in cortisol are harmful, right? When you exercise, you get a spike in blood pressure. That doesn't make exercise bad for you, right? Because what happens after the workout is your basal level of cortisol is lower. Your parasympathetic tone is lower. We need to look at our continuous chronic exposure of cortisol, not these brief spikes, because that's ultimately what matters for disease. Interesting. Have you done anything yet today? Today? So I did weights today. Today was my resistance training day.
[1:08:26] Do weights also activate the stress responses? You know, this is a really fascinating question because, you know, I think our prototype of a hormetic benefit is, like I described earlier, about building muscle from weightlifting. But when you look at the literature of how exercise drives our cellular stress responses, most of what we know and what seems to be the most powerful is the aerobic exercise. There is a little bit of data on resistance training, but truly most of it is in the bucket of aerobic exercise. And that's why so much of the protocol that I talk people through in the book is aerobic activity.
[1:09:09] And this is, you know, again, these are not either or questions. You know, I hate that conversations end up being, is it aerobic or resistance training? Is it, you know, animal or a plant? Like the answer is generally like we can do both, right? Like you can do aerobic and resistance training. Like I can walk and chew gum. Like I feel confident that people can do this. And you need one to support the other. If you don't have strong muscles, there is a limit to the cardiorespiratory fitness you're going to be able to achieve. And if you don't have the endurance, there's a limit to how much strength resistance training you are going to be able to do. So think of the resistance training as the foundation to build that aerobic base. But think of the aerobic base as what really activates your hormetic ability to regenerate your body. Yeah. It seems like this is just my perception.
[1:10:09] Especially amongst people that are getting older, that going out and doing something aerobic seems like it would be a lot easier than actually figuring out how to lift weights. Do I have to go to a gym? Do I purchase stuff and have them in my home or my garage? And we all know that sarcopenia is a real thing, the wasting away of muscle mass as we age. And I think that many elderly Americans are suffering from that.
[1:10:37] Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. So I would add it's actually, for my practice, I call it osteosarcopenia epidemic because there's also an epidemic of osteopenia. Right now, one out of three people who break a hip in this country are male. We have, like, we see so much osteopenia in male patients. I'm probably one of the few people that actually does bone densities in my male patients. But we're not getting the stress stimulus to build muscle or bone, right? So there's just as much of an epidemic of osteopenia and osteoporosis that's happening from the lack of good stress. And when you're doing the weight-bearing exercise, you're basically getting those osteoblasts to help strengthen the bones, right? You're sending your bones the stimulus they need to create new bone, right? Without the stress stimulus, your bones don't get what they need to activate the osteoblasts. So they need that good stress. Yes, tension, tension. So you're right. Like right now, old and young, people are not doing the resistance training. It is about 20% of people are meeting the resistance training guideline recommendations, which is twice a week, right?
[1:11:54] We are so far short of that. And even when we do, I think people are avoiding the intensity. And as people get older, we're also telling people, oh, take it easy. And oh, you're too old to be doing this, which is the absolute worst advice because your body works in a use it or lose it capacity. And if we give our bodies the signal of doing less, we will be able to do less. Right. We're weakening ourselves.
[1:12:20] It's all so good. Let's talk about heat exposure, cold exposure. I guess, you know, I think a personality that has really come on strong in the last probably decade is Wim Hof, his whole philosophy around, you know, cold exposure. I didn't know that he also did heat, but he also does heat. But, like, talk to me about thermal therapies. Yeah. So thermal therapy, you know, it is really working hormetically like these other stressors.
[1:12:55] You know, I think so much of our lifestyle driven approaches have been centered around food and exercise. But thermal stress is also a lifestyle habit that can activate these cellular stress responses. When our body is exposed to extreme cold or extreme heat, our core body temperature is respectively going to either go up or down, right? Away from that 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius, which is like the optimal range where our enzymes function at their best. So our body perceives that as a stress. And these homeostatic feedback mechanisms that are trying to reestablish that thermostat, you know, back to our optimal body, temperatures start to kick in. And that's what activates these cellular stress responses. One of them we talked about being heat shock proteins, but really all of our stress responses get activated, like sirtuins get activated by temperature exposure. We activate our mitochondria to become healthier. So our antioxidant defenses, anti-inflammatory defenses, these are all getting activated. So you are achieving a level of cellular health from the temperature exposures. Do you have a recommendation for how long, what temperatures? Yeah. You know, of course I do.
[1:14:24] Silly question, Rip. Now that you ask. So again, if we apply the same principle of high intensity interval training to temperature, I'll start off by saying it's what's cold to you. It's what's hot to you. Right. So everyone has a different level at which it's going to feel stressful and honor your body. That is so important. So you want to get to a temperature level. Pushes you out of your comfort zone, right? It feels uncomfortable, but it's not overwhelming where you feel like I'm going to die. I need to get out.
[1:15:05] So that's kind of the hormetic or Goldilocks zone. And that's what you want to achieve with all of these good stressors, right? Like not too much, not too little, but a just right amount of stress. So you want to get uncomfortable. And I'm, you know, I'm very much a DIY person. So to me, like, you know, cold showers are a great way to do this. You can do it with a hot bath. You don't have to have fancy equipment, but if you do, certainly you can do it in a very controlled way. And that's awesome and wonderful if you do. But back to this being practical and accessible, it could be anything like 30 seconds of cold at the end of a shower. It could be a hot bath at night, around 102 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. That seems to be used in some clinical studies as a range that triggers these hormetic benefits. Nice. Yeah.
[1:16:02] I'd love to just share some examples. So this last Christmas, my family, we've fallen in love with the North shore of Lake Superior. And so we went there for Christmas and every, our goal was every day to get in Lake Superior. That was about 34 degrees. I love it. Yeah. And, and it was, you know, my wife was incredible. I mean, she could stay in there for, you know, two, three minutes. Most of us, it was like 30, 45 seconds and you're out of there. That's cold. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the colder the temperature, the shorter duration, right? It's just like spring interval training. Right. And then if you're at a more moderate temperature, you can do a longer duration, and there are benefits to both. Yeah. And then conversely, for spring break, we went to this Caribbean island, and they had these—.
[1:16:58] Natural, hot springs. And they varied from 102. The hottest was 114. I've never been in something that warm. I thought I was going to turn into a lobster, but I probably stayed in there a good two and a half, three minutes and it was brutal.
[1:17:16] It felt just as bad and awful as 34 degrees.
[1:17:22] Yeah, I mean, it's really, yeah, I mean, you have to be very careful with these temperature extremes, especially if a person is underlying, like, heart or blood pressure problems, right? Because that level of heat actually mimics the same physiology in our body as moderate to intense exercise. Like, your heart rate goes up to about 120 to 150 beats per minute under these types of hot temperature exposures.
[1:17:50] And um you know so your cardiac output is significantly increased your blood pressure is going up so um you do have to be careful um but at the same time you get a lot of the benefits that you would from exercise like you create this sheer stress on your arteries so the direction of blood flow coming um from your core out to your periphery so you can evaporate um the heat off your skin creates a shearing stress on the endothelial lining of your blood vessels. And it helps the endothelial cells secrete more nitric oxide, which I know you know very well how potent that is as this magic molecule that helps you vasodilate. It reduces clotting in your blood vessels. It essentially creates a less atherogenic environment in your blood vessel lining. And we We have like 60,000 miles of endothelial cells separating blood from our blood vessel wall. And to make these cells healthier, again, this is all cellular health, you're going the most upstream in your prevention of cardiovascular disease.
[1:18:57] So we have recommendations for how much plants to get a day. I think five servings of fruits and veggies for aerobic exercise. I think you said it's 180 minutes and maybe two of the high intensity interval training a week. What about with these thermal therapies? Do you have a recommendation? How many times a week? Yeah. You know, like most lifestyle interventions, it really depends on your goals. If you want the mental health benefit, you can do like short, brief exposures, like the 30 seconds in like 34 degree temperature water, because we know that that acute stress can raise the norepinephrine and dopamine levels in your body. So you can do that very brief, 30 seconds even.
[1:19:48] And, you know, because these are stressors, generally, if you do it short intervals, you probably can do it every day. for some people that's just too much. It becomes a chronic stress. But I would recommend doing some kind of thermal exposure at least once a week. You know, when you look at sauna studies done out of Finland, people use a sauna four to seven times a week compared to a control group, which in Finland is once a week because everyone uses a sauna, right? So your control group uses it once a week. Everybody's got one in their house. Right, right. So that's the best we can do for control. But when you look at four to seven times a week compared to that control group of once a week, over a 20-year or two-decade span, because this is such a cultural tradition in Finland, we have longitudinal data, you see a 50% reduction in cardiovascular death, 65% reduction in Alzheimer's disease. I mean, really powerful to even do it more often. But I would say, I mean, at minimum, just try and get at least once or twice a week. But if you can do like four to seven times a week of sauna exposure or heat therapy, like more power to you. I mean, I think the key is just trusting and honoring your body and listening to it. If you've never done it before, I would not start there.
[1:21:09] Once a week is like a really good way. And the way hormesis works is stress, recover, repeat, stress, recover, repeat. So every time you're exposed to a stressor through the recovery, you become better adapted to handle that stress in the future. You do that over time.
Hormetic Health Benefits
[1:21:24] And that's how you become a more resilient person. And in studies on hormesis, we know from any exposure, you can increase your human potential 20 to 25%. But when you follow this pattern of stress recover repeat over time, you can increase your potential 60 to 90%. You.
[1:21:45] That's amazing. How do they measure that? Do you have any idea? Yeah, this is done primarily looking at plant and animals through different toxic exposures. So there are thousands of different exposures where hormesis has been tested. So a lot of this is not done through human studies, but it gives us a sense of how our stress responses work. So these stress responses are highly conserved with plant and animal species. They are conserved on a set of genes we call vita genes or vitality genes. And they have been handed down to us because they are so critical for survival. But other species share these stress responses. Yeah. You've got a really incredible, on the back of this book, right? You have some amazing shout outs from some of my great buddies, you know, Dan Buechner, who's been on the podcast at least four times. Dr. Will Bolshevitz, right? Mr. Gut Microbiome. Dr. Robin Shuttkan, again, like, wow, Robin's a rock star. Dr. Walter Longo. I mean, you talk about another rock star, right? The director of the Longevity Institute at USC. Wow. You know, when I'm.
[1:23:11] I was just thinking how, you know, when I do one of these thermal therapies, whether it's get in a pool that's 50 degrees for three minutes or get into a sauna, how afterwards I feel like reborn. I feel amazing. And it's the same thing when I do the exercise.
[1:23:32] Not as intense, but the same thing when I eat a really good, you know, whole food plant-based meal. So I say all that because I do feel like after I do any of these things, I am regenerated. That's exactly what's happening. Let's talk about fasting because I think that's the fourth of your five principles. Yeah, so fasting can mean so many different things, and there are so many different methods. So we all fast overnight, right? It's just a period of not eating, and there are different ways to extend that overnight fast. The type that I advocate for through the lens of hormesis is time-restricted eating, but some people do 5-2 fast. They do alternate day fasting. There are many ways to fast, but they've never been studied head to head. So there's not one that's really shown to be superior to the others. Did you say five to five to five to that mean five days on two days off? Or what does that mean?
[1:24:46] Yeah. Or two days a week, you significantly reduce your caloric intake and you can eat ad libum, you know, just throughout the remainder of the time. So people do it in different ways. some do alternate day of doing that. There's so many regimens that you can do. But the key is that when we are in an eating phase, our bodies are storing energy, they're building up energy. And when we're in a fasted state, we're breaking down energy. And you can only be in one state or the other. You can either be building up or breaking down. And right now, because the average American eating over a 15-hour window, we spend more time building up and not enough time breaking down. So essentially, we need to go 12 or more hours a day of not eating to kind of switch our bodies into this breakdown mode. And both are critically important for our bodies to be in balance. So I think fasting is actually in that capacity, time-restricted eating, where you're eating in, you know, at minimum, you know, trying to go 12 hours without eating and optimally up to 14 hours. And I'll explain that in a second.
[1:26:07] But I call this normal eating. So I, again, sometimes the terminology makes fasting seem like that's the extreme intervention. But the reality is that is normal eating and eating 15 hours a day is the intervention. And if I were to go to our IRB saying I have this great randomized control trial, I'm going to have people eat around the clock 15 hours a day, whatever they want, and they start developing diabetes and all this chronic disease, that study would probably be halted early or would be too unethical to continue. Yet that's what we're doing every day. So to me, the normal eating is actually eating in a 12-hour window.
[1:26:47] When we go more than 12 hours of not eating, our bodies have a switch, kind of the switch that happens when we go from burning glycogen or glucose for energy to burning fat. So the metabolic switch helps us start using fat for energy. Our liver converts the fat to ketones. And ketones are actually signaling molecules. They communicate to the rest of our body. And what they're communicating is to activate these cellular stress responses that start the processes of repair and regeneration. So our body senses, there's not incoming nutrients. That's a stress state, right? Energy depletion, our cells hunker down and they start to figuring out ways where they can become more efficient. So if there's some older cells that aren't really super efficient, they kind of kill off the older cells. And if there's some damaged ones, they recycle them and we become more metabolically efficient. So our insulin sensitivity increases so we can uptake glucose.
[1:27:52] So there's clear metabolic benefit to our cells operating more efficiently and of course, more restorative benefits from the repair and regeneration. And when we switch back to eating, so we can have that molecular switch back from fat consumption or fat breakdown to now using glucose for energy when we feed, we start to grow preferentially healthier cells. So we're slowly regenerating our body through time-restricted eating, where we stress repair, we grow healthier cells, stress repair, grow healthier cells. And that is one of the biggest tools for mitigating some of the damage from all of the kind of exposures that we have today. As an added bonus, I would recommend people time their eating window with their circadian biology. So our bodies have a circadian clock where within a 24-hour cycle, we are optimized to break down food, digest food earlier in the day.
[1:28:55] Have higher cognitive abilities earlier midday, and our ability to exercise, our endurance states are higher kind of in that midday. By evening time, our bodies are winding down because we do a lot of our repair and restorative functions while we're sleeping. So if a person is eating a large meal late at night, when our bodies are really preparing for sleep and the shutting down, It's essentially telling our bodies, wait.
[1:29:24] You know, don't start all the repair yet. So if you think like, let's say you ran a coffee shop and at night the customers are gone, you want to turn off the lights and you want to start mopping and cleaning and restocking the shelves to prepare for the next day.
[1:29:39] If another customer walked in at 10 o'clock or you ate this big meal, you're like, wait, wait, don't turn off the lights. Start the coffee machine again. Start the oven again, right? Your body has no time to do the repair and what it needs to do to prepare for you to be efficient the next day, right? So if all these customers come in and you didn't mop the floors and the bathrooms are dirty, the next day isn't going to go well. And you do that day after day and you end up with chronic disease. So we have to optimize our eating pattern with our circadian biology for our bodies to efficiently repair the damage and heal overnight.
[1:30:15] Right now, about 45% of calories are being consumed at dinner or later in the evening in just our modern lives. And if you look at longitudinal studies, there's a study that followed 8,000 people over four years and people who ate a large dinner snacked after dinner and men had a twofold higher rate of obesity and women, it was threefold higher. The metabolic havoc that we are creating by eating at times when our bodies cannot efficiently break down the food when our insulin level is lower is in itself like such a risk factor, right? It's the timing of our meals as well as what we're eating. So PLANTSTRONG plus when to eat those plants to be strongest are really the two parts to that. Do you know, do our bodies in any way fundamentally change as we get older as far as, like, yes?
[1:31:14] Yeah. So all of these repair mechanisms that we have decrease with aging.
[1:31:21] Add to that, we have this horrendous lifestyle where we're not even activating what we need to stay healthy. So it's like adding insult to injury. And what's really just remarkable is if you look at the biology of aging, the biology of aging is actually the same pathways we're talking about becoming dysfunctional. So our ability to create balance in our proteins, our loss of proteostasis is one of the molecular hallmarks of aging. There are nine of them. Deregulation of our nutrient sensing capability is another molecular pathway that leads to aging.
[1:32:00] Epigenetic changes, telomereotrician genomic instability, but so much of what is getting activated by good stressors as actually negating the molecular pathways that we know are associated with aging. And the fact that our repair capacity decreases with aging tells you how important it is to continue doing these good stressors throughout your life, right? So our autophagy response decreases as we're aging. Our mitochondrial function decreases as we are aging. If we are not taking ownership of our health, and actively working against that, we just end up in a state of debility and decline in our later years. Yeah. So I want to ask you a question.
The Science of Stress
[1:32:55] I'm trying to think how to phrase it. This will be good. Well, so, you know, Dr. Michael Clapper, do you know who Dr. Michael Yeah, a little like rock star. And, you know, he has said that the... The whole keto phenomenon is essentially a physiological parlor trick, right? That kind of mimics what would happen if we were, you know, back in the whatever Serengeti and we had to go, let's say a week or two without food, your body kind of goes into this mode where you're burning fats, your appetite is decreased. And it's an adaptation, right, to allow us to survive. So you mentioned that, you know, when you go over 12 hours, I think you said, without eating, you basically now allow, you start burning ketones. Yes. And that there's some benefits to that. Yes. And I'm just wondering, so if, let's say I'm on a ketogenic diet and all I'm eating is meat. So I'm not eating the plants, right? And you mentioned how just a little bit of plants can have such a powerful effect, good stressors.
[1:34:20] But I am allowing my body to get into this ketogenic state. Like how helpful is that if I'm fueling my body with meat and whatnot? I mean, is there a trade-off there? Yeah. So again, if we look at this through the lens of hormesis. There's so many ways to look at ketogenic diets, but I'll kind of stick to this hormetic benefit. If you go back to what you were saying before about when you were a pro athlete and you would just work out so hard and continuously to the point of injury, right? So when you enter the state of ketosis, the 12 hours of being in a fasted state, Yes, you activate these stress responses.
[1:35:09] If you do too much of these good stressors, they can actually become chronic and potentially harmful. So in the case here of going into a state of ketosis, like I said before, you want this balance of growth, repair, buildup, breakdown, right? So some breakdown in ketosis is good. If you continue to do that, that is not, more is not better, right? So it's the alternating, This is why I think time-restricted eating is like what I would advocate for as a method of fasting because you are getting intervals of the ketosis, but it's the back and forth stress recovery, stress recovery. That is the key for optimizing our human health. So glad I asked that question and what a great answer. It's really helping it all kind of come into focus. Um so is there anything else that you want to say about fasting before we go into mental challenges.
[1:36:11] No i i just um really hope that people view this as a normal way of eating and um in an ideal state if you you know again to give people tips as we have for the other hormetic stressors what that looks like is starting to eat at least an hour before you wake up and trying to end eating two to three hours before bed with at least half your calories in the first half of the day. One more question regarding this, and that is, I typically exercise first thing in the morning. Usually it's at seven o'clock. I swim with a master's program. I typically, the last thing I eat is usually not after eight o'clock. Do you have any recommendation on, is it beneficial to eat before I exercise? Is it a personal thing or is there any...
[1:37:01] Physiological benefits to me not eating before I work out or vice versa? Yeah, this is such a hotly debated question. And I will say probably two things are relevant here. One is, yes, there's tremendous bio-individuality, meaning there's no blanket statement I could make that's going to apply to everyone. And I actually really cringe when people make these blanket statements because everyone's different. All my patients are different. You have to understand and honor your body. The second part to this is what is the intensity of the exercise? So if your swim is a kind of like a low to moderate intensity swim, you're primarily using the oxidative pathway in your mitochondria, which primarily utilize fats for energy.
[1:37:53] In that mode you can be in a fasted state where your body is using fat as it's you know you're breaking down fat as a primary fuel source it's you're essentially extending the benefit of kind of stressing your mitochondria and this oxidative phosphorylation pathway if you're trying to do bursts of intense swimming like all out sprint you know fast as you can And you'll probably bonk if you try and do too much in a fasted state. So a very long workout or a very high intense, you may bonk because you do then need to use the glycolytic pathway in your body, which is your other energy system that is using like an anaerobic pathway. So you're using some aerobic, but also starting to use some of the anaerobic systems, which utilize glucose for the quick energy. So if you want to do a burst of a workout and you are a very highly trained athlete where performance is a real issue, then eating to fuel that really intense workout is beneficial. If you're more of an everyday exerciser where, you know what, you just want to get some exercise in in the morning before you start your day and it's not that human performance level, you could probably do it in the fastest state.
[1:39:16] Thank you for that answer. Good. Sure. All right. So we've talked about plants. We've talked about movement. We've talked about thermal stress, fasting.
Mental Challenges and Resilience
[1:39:27] You ready to tackle the last one or is it stressing you out? I love the last one. The last one is actually what just sings to my heart. So I'm happy to talk about it because I hope that this gives people the freedom to take on some good mental challenges and not fear stress. So to me, this is such a hugely important one of the stressors.
[1:39:56] Okay. So let's talk challenging yourself mentally and emotionally. Yeah. So again, this is where it's paradoxical, right? In that we're already so stressed. And I hear telling people, add stress to your life, right? But I promise you, this is not stress for the sake of stress. This is stress for the sake of reaching a higher level of resilience. So the paradox is essentially that we need stress to build stress resilience. And that has become such an overlooked way where we can build resilience. So much of stress management centers around mind-body practices, which I think are wonderful and amazing, but so much of those practices are structured to try and bring us back to the present, reduce the chronicity of that stress response. And so much of the advice is to draw boundaries and remove stress from our lives. But sometimes stress is unavoidable. It is unpredictable.
[1:41:00] And that approach just simply is not going to work for everybody. So we need a different set of tools. And this is a very counterintuitive different set of tools to build resilience by adding stress instead of taking away. So just like instead of worrying about what to remove from our diet and adding plants, we're adding good stress instead of worrying so much about removing the bad stress. I like that a lot. So can you give me an example of some things that you have done in your life? Yeah, absolutely. So good stressors, when we're talking about mental and emotional ones, are ones that align with your sense of like what your belief system is. They have to be meaningful to you. They will contribute to something bigger than you. So the questions to ask yourself if you are trying to figure out if a stress is good or what a good stress should look like in your life is ask yourself, like, what have you done in your life that has made you feel the most alive? What have you done in your life that makes you feel that you are contributing to your community, to your family, to your work in a way that matters to you?
[1:42:11] What stretches you and helps you grow? Like those are the questions you need to ask to know what is good stress and trust that the biochemistry of the stress response when you take on these types of good stressors is not the same threat based biochemistry as running from a burning building. Okay, so usually we think of the stress response as, you know, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and then the cortisol spikes. But when you take on these good stressors, the hormones and neurotransmitters you're releasing are far more intricate. If you're contributing to a greater good, you're releasing oxytocin, the cuddle hormone. You are releasing norepinephrine, which is very motivating. You're releasing dopamine, which is our reward pathway. You're releasing serotonin, which helps us, our mood helps us feel better.
[1:43:07] These hormones and neurotransmitters that we're releasing from good stress actually mitigate and reduce cortisol reactivity. So what's really amazing, again, is you're adding the good stress to reduce your state of chronic stress. You're buffering cortisol when you take on these good stressors. So not all stressors are the same. And to me, this is what opens up the possibility for you to pursue a life of meaning and not fear stress, no matter what your current state is, and trust that your body was meant to thrive on this. And that this is, I mean, we all have this incredible potential to live this life of possibility. Most of us are just leaving a lot on the table.
[1:43:57] And I just really feel so strongly about sharing that when you take on these good stressors, you not only help buffer cortisol and cortisol reactivity, but you're actually building pathways in your brain that help you remember how you handle the stress so that the next time you face that a stress or similar stress, you are better capable of handling that stress. You are building the foundation, the mental breadcrumbs and the synaptic pathways are getting built. So you become better at handling stress and stress avoidance. Doesn't give you the opportunity to create these rich neural pathways, right? So the connectivity in your brain becomes stronger and you become a more creative person. Your mood is regulated. And I think sometimes when we avoid stress, we don't build these pathways and we weaken our resilience. So mental health problems are just as much of an epidemic in this country as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases, right? We're seeing epidemic rates of anxiety and depression. So these good stressors are such a holistic way to build whole body health by just pushing yourself to get yourself to that higher state of ability. So if you had your way.
[1:45:25] How early do you think this should be introduced to youngsters well i i have three kids that are my little human experiment um you can ask them um so a lot of brain growth and development is done in our early years into like our teen years is when we have this optimal window of neuroplasticity and growth. And what's really fascinating is this concept of stress inoculation, especially when kids are younger, where the stress is like a vaccine and you're essentially with small bursts of stress, you're helping a child build immunity to stress. I mean, just hence the term stress inoculation. So with my kids, what that looks like, I should say, in my poor kid's life as they are my guinea pigs, is... If they have a project that is due tomorrow and they did not necessarily do a whole lot for it. And it's the night before. And, you know, it seems modern day school projects have become a family project.
[1:46:39] And I just tell my kids, I've done my homework. This isn't my homework like I did mine years ago. And this is like a mild to moderate amount of stress. This is not childhood adversity. Like there's no question severe adversity, right? Like that what doesn't kill you type of adversity leads to like long-term reduced resilience as people get older and sequelae in later adult life. But we're talking mild to moderate, not adversity, but ordinary stress. This is ordinary everyday stress. So I just wish my kids well and I go to bed and I just say, you know, I'm sure you'll do great.
[1:47:24] You know you can figure this out and my kids in elementary school were the only ones you know you go to parent teacher night and you look at these little drawings on the wall of the projects that they've kids have turned in and some are like these incredible pieces of art and there's my kids with the scribbly little things i love it you can tell like which kids actually did their homework um so you know but My kids are now teenagers, and I am very proud to say that they're very independent teenagers that really weather a lot of the challenges that I think kids face today quite well. Like, I think they maintain a sense of humor. They can see the bigger picture, which is such an adaptive way to approach stress, right? Instead of turning inward and thinking about what you need to do and everything about you, and if you can just have that skill set to look outward and think of how in those moments of stress you can contribute to a greater good, that is actually what helps us reduce our own stress, right? Doing good for others is actually one of the most powerful ways to do good for ourselves.
[1:48:35] And I think I have inculcated in them this ability to do that and not lose sight of that bigger picture by just letting them absorb that stress. And every time they do, they become more confident that they can do this again in the future and their brains are becoming better wired so they can do this. So the literal structure and function of their little brains are changing, right? So hormesis is actually allowing us to understand what resilience means at a biological and physical level, like what is changing in the structure and function of our body that enables us greater capability. And that is what I see happening with my kids. And again, this is not for every child. You have to do this in a very thoughtful way. Parents know their own children best. Some children come into this world with certain ways they are wired where this is not. A one size fits all by any means. But I think being open to the idea of letting them have these everyday ordinary short term challenges and having them own them so that they have the opportunity to build resilience and build their own confidence, I think is hugely important. How many children do you have? What are they, boys, girls? All girls, that's all I make.
[1:50:01] That's really funny. Well, I have two girls and a boy. So it's very interesting, the difference in the way the boy is wired compared to the girls. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Who knew?
Stress Inoculation in Children
[1:50:15] Who knew, yeah. Tell me, so what about future research? Anything that really gets you excited about areas of research? Yeah. So one of the projects that we did on psychological stress has been on rate of biological aging or on biological age, where we've looked at epigenetic aging. And we actually published on how a hormetic amount of perceived stress leads to a lower biological age, which is somewhat counterintuitive, right? We went into this thinking low stress would have like the lowest biological age. And we found really this moderate amount, this Goldilocks range is optimal in a group that we tested that had low resilience. So to me, I think it's hugely exciting to look at biomarkers such as our rate of aging. So we have now a Dunedin-Pace clock, which is looking at the rate of aging as opposed to just biological age.
[1:51:27] That allows us to take an intervention and in a short time frame, see the impact of that intervention on our rate of aging, which I think is hugely powerful, If we can take plant food or change a dietary pattern of somebody three months later, look at their rate of aging to see if we have actually changed that, to me, is just phenomenal. So I think looking at what the technology and our ability to measure changes in the human body is going to be a really exciting area. A lot of that capability, the algorithms that help us look at the epigenetic changes to look at The rate of aging are driven by machine learning, which is AI. So the integration of AI in research, I think, is going to be like just an explosion.
[1:52:20] And I think the integration of AI into point of decision making, like when a person is at the grocery store, what do they buy? And these gentle nudges can be AI-driven, app-driven nudges to help people reach their lifestyle goals in a way that no physician in one visit or multiple visits will ever be able to do. So the integration of AI with these apps and, of course, the wearables, which help us understand our own bodies, are going to be like the three intersecting points that are going to help us, I think, reach unprecedented levels of health. Are there any apps or wearables that you utilize personally?
[1:53:02] You know, I play with different ones all the time. Like I'm always trying to figure out, you know, what I'm trying to optimize and how best to optimize it right now. Like I'm working on sleep. I think that that's a really hard lifestyle factors. I'm trying different wearables to just test out what I think is giving a better prediction of how much time I'm spending in REM sleep. Sometimes some of them I question if that's truly what I mean, I feel great, but it's telling me a different thing or vice versa. So I kind of rotate through a lot of the very popular ones depending on what I'm looking for. But I think it's fun to do. I think, you know, you have to take any result with a grain of salt because they're, you know, they're not always super reliable or, you know, in terms of accuracy, but they help you with trends. I think that that's a really important part. Is there such a thing as sleep, hormesis?
[1:54:06] You know, sleep is a critical part of the recovery process. So I think that, you know, again, you need stress recovery. So like you mentioned, if you were to do your workouts differently, that recovery piece is huge. So sleep is such an important part of the adaptations from exercise and building and how your body restructures and remodels in that recovery phase. So much of it is done in sleep. So to me, that is a critical part of all this. This is not just stress, stress, stress. It's stress, recovery, stress, recovery, right? This yin and yang, it's Tom and Jerry. It's peanut butter and jelly. You can't really take the two apart. But so has there been any research to show that, for example...
[1:54:59] Yes, it's great. You get a good eight, nine, 10 hours of sleep. And then one night a week, you want to get three hours of sleep, right? To really stress that system. Probably not a good idea. No. So when you don't have adequate recovery, your ability to stress yourself the next day is less. So you know how we're saying that you have to find this Goldilocks zone for you. So if you got the three hours of sleep, you're probably not going to do a HIIT workout the next day. You're probably going to do like a zone two, right? So you need that recovery because it's not just different from person to person how much stress you can take on on a given day. It is also within the same person, different day to day, depending on your recovery. So I think that's a key part. Yeah. I know when I was a firefighter, I have shifts where I would get one, two hours of sleep and I would be just such an absolute wreck, wreck the next day. Oh, that's my residency. I mean, I still take call. But yeah, yeah, I know. Like 25 years later, we still do call. That's a thing. But yes, I remember my residency days where it was like every other, every third night, you're just up.
[1:56:15] I'm winding down here. I really appreciate your time today. It's a pleasure. What do you foresee as far as, you know, we talked about how the advances in medicine are just accelerating. It's crazy.
Future of Longevity Research
[1:56:30] Do you believe if you're alive in the next 10 or 15 years, you will potentially have the option to be able to live to 120, 30, 40 if you do all these things right? Yeah, this whole longevity, escape velocity idea. You know, I think that the human body is unbelievably intricate. I think we have so many interrelated pathways that it is going to be very difficult to kind of do anything that if you change one pathway.
[1:57:16] You're not looking at the totality of everything that contributes to the aging process like it's I think we have to be really careful of what's realistic our bodies like we don't, fully understand all the mechanisms in our body. I think within science, we have to have so much humility of what we don't know. We focus so much on what we know. There is so much we don't know about the aging process, right? We have nine hallmarks of aging that have been expanded to 11. We are scratching the surface. And to me, it's going to be very hard to kind of fully understand and reverse that process. I think we can slow aging. I think we know enough to say that, okay, this lifestyle component slows these pathways. We know these are the pathways that are affected by aging, and we have incredible mechanistic data suggesting that this is going to slow the aging process. And now we're developing epigenetic ways to test whether There are rate of aging, these earlier biomarkers, you know, instead of that longitudinal, they follow people for 100 years to see if what you're doing is working, those types of studies. But we are so far from where we can say that we can kind of biohack our bodies.
[1:58:45] You know, I think right now the longest human living person on record is 122 years, right? It's Jean-Marie Calmer, and I'm probably mispronouncing her name. That's our probably human lifespan. And when you look at life expectancy right now in the United States, you know, it's different for men and women, but generally in the 70s. So when you look at the delta between life expectancy and human lifespan, there is tremendous potential to add years to our life rate. Like we're clearly not meeting that gap between human lifespan and life expectancy. So by doing these lifestyle things, these good stressors, you can help bridge that delta. I think that alone can add four or five decades to our life.
[1:59:42] But can we push that human ability past 122 years or 120 years? I, you know, I hate to be the, you know, Debbie Downer in all of this because it sounds so exciting to be able to do that. But I just also have such humility of how science compares to the intricate ways our bodies are designed. Um i have just um incredible awe um and wonder at our incredible capacity of you know everything we're talking about we just unearthed these cellular stress responses in the last couple decades like we've had these for 2.4 million years plus science is just catching up to understanding our body so i i approach it with so much humility yeah so i i'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer. I think there's so much potential for living longer, healthier lives. I just don't know if we can push that lifespan piece. Yeah, but we can push the healthspan piece.
[2:00:51] Unquestionable. Unquestionable. And gosh, yes. And we sorely need it. I think we just need this massive course correction. And the message I'm sharing is not go hard because you need grit. The message I'm sharing is one of if you love yourself, this is how you nurture yourself. The hard is the kind of flip side to the growth. And this is, in my head, well-being. This is the ultimate well-being. It's going hard for being able to become a better mental and physical health. I think we've just had a mental a mental we just had a master class on the stress paradox that was really that was that was so fun i have to say sharon that i think i have a serious intellectual crush on you um.
[2:01:55] Coming from europe that is so flattering because i have such respect for you and the work your family has done and all that you've contributed to just nudging human health in such a positive direction so i take that with such like such a compliment well i hope you do you should and And everybody, just before we close out. The Stress Paradox. It just came out a little over a month ago. So kudos to you, Sharon, on bringing this to the universe. Super exciting stuff and ways that we can all kind of maximize our health, our health span. And you've done it in such a marvelous way.
[2:02:42] Will you please come back on the podcast again? I would be honored and delighted. Absolutely. Fabulous. So where can people find out more about you, order the book, all those great things? So my website is probably the best place. So Dr. Sharon Berquist, so it's right there on the podcast notes, but it's D-R-S-H-A-R-O-N-B-E-R-G-Q-U-I-S-T.com. All is one word. Information about the book is there. It's available internationally right now, and it's getting translated to multiple languages. So it's hugely exciting. And then there's more information about me. You can also find me on Instagram at thegoodstressdoctor. Oh, good. And also on LinkedIn. How long have you had that handle on Instagram? Oh, not long. This is maybe eight months. It just sounded good.
[2:03:41] And it dovetails so nicely with your book and your message. Yeah, yeah. And that's really, I think, why I changed the handle, because I want this concept of people understanding good stress and bad stress in their life and how that they can reclaim their health by differentiating the two and not fearing all stress. So seeing that handle prompts you to remember that I've accomplished what I've hoped to do. Are you practicing day-to-day right now? Yeah. Yeah. So I do clinical practice. That's such a core of what I do. Yeah.
[2:04:25] Uh, Sharon, it was so wonderful to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. An absolute pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much. Can you give me a PLANTSTRONG virtual fist bump on the way out? Boom!
[2:04:37] There you go. I love it. Yeah! Yeah, I love it.
[2:04:42] The Stress Paradox is out now and available wherever books are sold. As always, I'll make sure to put a link in today's show notes to make it super easy for you. I hope that this conversation with Dr. Sharon gave you a new perspective on stress and how to use it to support your health, not sabotage it. If you found this episode helpful, please do share it with a friend or loved one who might need a new way of looking at stress as well. As always, take what serves you, keep leaning into the small challenges that help you grow, and always, always keep it PLANTSTRONG. A very beneficial stress. The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. If you like what you hear, do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones. You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
